How to Make a Hate Map

Neo-Nazis and anti-immigrant groups are having a banner year in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s guide to hate in America.

Last week, Heidi Beirich gave a visitor a tour of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s office, in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. The following day, the nonprofit would unveil its annual Hate Map of America, a main feature of the spring issue of its biannual Intelligence Report, which focusses on the radical right. A wall was plastered with past covers. One read “Rebels with a Cause.” It was illustrated with a very un-James-Dean-ish image of neo-Confederates. She pointed to a cover from 2014. “This line I came up with,” she said. “ ‘White Homicide Worldwide.’ ”

Beirich, who has a Ph.D. in political science, began working at the S.P.L.C. as an intern, in 1999, and is now the director of its Intelligence Project. She became interested in hate groups in high school, in Vista, California. “The White Aryan Resistance were recruiting people out of my class,” she said. “That’s something you don’t forget.

“This was our first international issue,” Beirich went on, pointing to a 2001 cover bearing the line “Dangerous Liaisons.” “We showed connections between people like Jared Taylor”—the white nationalist who edited the Web site American Renaissance—“and his European equivalents.” She added, “Nowadays, this seems totally normal, with Nigel Farage on Fox.”

Other covers include “Age of Rage: Angry Young Racists Are Ready To Rumble” (2004) and “Holy War: The Religious Right’s Crusade Against Gays Heats Up” (2005). A screaming Donald Trump graced last year’s spring cover. (“I doubt he put that one in his trophy room,” Beirich said, laughing.) This year’s cover is a collage of a dozen white men, wearing sunglasses and hoisting hate flags, who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Sitting down at a conference table, Beirich pulled out the newest Hate Map, which had nine hundred and fifty-four dots, mostly clustered around urban centers. Last year, there were nine hundred and seventeen. Each of the groups on the map was identified by a symbol signifying its particular stripe of hatefulness: white nationalist, racist skinhead, black nationalist, anti-L.G.B.T., general hate, and so on. Beirich said, “The bulk of the increase is neo-Nazi groups, which went up by twenty-two, to a hundred and twenty-one. A banner year for Nazis, buoyed by Trump.” Other increases: anti-Muslim groups (from a hundred and one to a hundred and fourteen); anti-immigrant groups (fourteen to twenty-two); and anti-government groups (six hundred and twenty-three to six hundred and eighty-nine). “There are lots of these folks popping out of the woodwork,” she added.

“The Klan collapsed, almost by half, down to seventy-two groups,” Beirich continued. “People in Identity Evropa, Richard Spencer’s various outfits, and other white supremacists—they don’t have as much interest in the Klan thing. They’ve got their ‘fasc-y’ haircuts and their little polo shirts. The Klan, as a style, is dying. But it is the iconic American hate group. Our first report was just Klanwatch. But these young people, they’re more influenced by Europe’s identitarian movement.” She told her white male visitor, “You could fit in.”

Another trend: “The black hate groups are up. The second-biggest percentage growth, behind the Nazis.” She went on, “Some blacks have just given up on the United States of Trump and Sessions, and their abandonment of police reforms and civil rights. It’s not surprising.”

Beirich pointed to a dot on the map labelled “Aggressive Christianity,” the name of a New Mexico group whose members have faced charges of child sex abuse; a couple of New Jersey skinhead groups; and Hatreon, which she described as “a Texan crowdfunding site for bad guys.” Hate groups in New York are up, too. “This one is interesting,” she said. “The Proud Boys, started by Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice. It’s pro-Western chauvinism. Extremely misogynistic. Rabidly anti-Islamic. They have a fraternal order of alt-knights. You get the idea.”

Beirich explained that the S.P.L.C. learns about hate groups from Web data scraping, cops, newspaper reporters, and its own research on the ground. As a practical necessity, some S.P.L.C. researchers “become sort of frenemies” with bigots. She herself has received dozens of e-mails, since 2013, from Jordan Jereb, a leader of the Republic of Florida, a group erroneously linked to Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school shooter. Jereb has long been begging Beirich to include his group on the Hate Map.

“When we first went down to check them out,” Beirich said, “it seemed like just a couple kids barely old enough to buy guns.” This year, the group made the list. “I’ll probably be getting an excited e-mail from Jordan,” she said, sighing.

Beirich escapes as often as possible to a cabin in the mountains. “There’s this huge corkboard in the living room that has pictures of maybe thirty people we’re concerned about,” she said. She named Cody Wilson, Andrew Anglin, and Andrew Auernheimer (“this scary anti-Semitic hacker”). She added, “A colleague put a photo of Jimmy Buffett up there as a joke. When my family came to visit, my mom’s boyfriend was, like, ‘How is Jimmy connected to the hate movement?’ My younger brother was just, like, ‘Who’s that guy on the boat with his shirt off?’ ” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 5, 2018, issue, with the headline “Hate Patrol.”

Charles Bethea is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and has written for The New Yorker since 2008.